Mr. Timm had fully come up to his promise to appear at table in good-humor and with a better appetite. He found the chocolate, which was by no means _énormément sucré_ excellent, the bread excellent, the butter excellent, everything excellent; and what a delightful idea to have the table set just on that part of the terrace from which one had such a charming view of the garden! How wonderfully fine those lights and shades were on the tall trees beyond the lawn! Really, a genuine Claude Lorraine! "Really, baron, if I were not Diogenes I should like to be Alexander! But then we cannot all dwell in marble palaces; there must be dwellers in tubs also, and happy the man whose tub is to him a castle! You ought to immortalize that thought in an epigram, Mrs. Jager! You have such a decided talent for that branch of poetry; even in your best lyric poems I have often found an epigrammatic turn. Thus in the charming little poem on the May Bug. How was the last line, 'The false image of May?' or like that? That is in itself already an epigram. Do you know that in Grunwald they have never yet got over your desertion? Only quite lately Professor Shylight, whom I met at Dean Black's, said: It is unwarrantable that a certain great scholar, whom I will not name, should bury the great wealth of his erudition in the solitude of a village. I replied that it was still more unwarrantable in the author of the 'Cornflowers' to live forever among cornflowers." Thus he rattled on with great alacrity, and yet all that Timm said seemed to drop accidentally from his lips, as if he had not the slightest idea of being clever or witty. One listened to him as to a merry canary-bird, too loud perhaps in his merriment, but who sees the sun come into his cage, and takes it into its little head to pour out all its songs and melodies for once. Oswald, however, could not help thinking at times that Timm's humor was, after all, not always quite as natural as it seemed to be. He fancied Timm was playing his well-studied and well-calculated part in a perfectly natural manner, to be sure, but so as to ridicule and chaff the whole company, while he seemed to be a good-natured _bon vivant_ and an ingenuous child of nature. He was confirmed in his suspicions by the fact that Timm always assumed an entirely different tone whenever he spoke to him, as if he meant: I must not venture upon such tricks with you; but they do not find me out so easily.